Gualala Arts Lecture Series presents the
Hardy Lecture on the Visual Arts

Material Witness:
Artists Respond to a Changing World

with Lucinda Barnes
Thursday, May 6, 2010, 7:00 p.m.
Admission is $5

Lucinda Barnes will give the Hardy Lecture on the Visual Arts at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 6, 2010, at the Gualala Arts Center.

Ms. Barnes, Chief Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum, is also the juror for The May Show. She has held curatorial positions at various museums in Chicago, Ohio and southern California. Her scholarly interests include contemporary art, with special interests in Renaissance and Latin American art.

The topic of Ms Barnes lecture will be artists' responses to a changing world. Throughout history artists have responded to conditions and circumstances of their time and place. In the first years of the twentieth century, Vassily Kandinsky wrote that every work of art is the child of its own time.

"Material Witness: Artists Respond to a Changing World" will focus on artists and works of art, mostly contemporary but also historical, that can be seen as forms of witness, a condition of seeing as well as remembering. Lucinda Barnes' talk will feature works of art that offer distinctive, often critical views of current affairs and cultural memory, evidencing truths and questioning commonly held beliefs.

Barnes will discuss artistic modes that vary from reportage to activist response, highlighting works of art ranging from Francisco Goya's The Disasters of War, a series of eighty-five etchings created in the early 1800s (at right), to Fernando Botero's recent Abu Ghraib paintings, a potent series of works inspired by written, rather than photographic, news accounts of the notorious prisoner abuses in Iraq. Barnes will also discuss artists and artistic practices engaged in positive social change, particularly motivated by response to and concern for the environment.

As part of recent Berkeley Art Museum exhibition Human/Nature focusing on the intersections of art and environmental conservation, Los Angeles-based artist Diana Thater wrote, "Art changes the world by changing the way you see. People can change the world through conservation, but we have to realize that the way the world is depicted also changes the world."

Ms. Barnes' lecture is the first Hardy Lecture on the Visual Arts, which will take place in conjunction with The May Show. It is supported in part by a donation given to Gualala Arts by Judy and Russ Hardy.

The Gualala Arts Center, located at 46501 Old State Highway in Gualala, CA,
is open weekdays 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and weekends from noon to 4:00 p.m.
Please call (707) 884-1138 for more information, or email info@gualalaarts.org.

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